Inconvenient Ideas

Whenever Darwin encountered a“published fact” or“new observation” that contradicted one of his beliefs, he forced himself to“make a memorandum of it without fail and at once.” Why did Darwin do this? Because he had“found by experience that such facts and thoughts” — those inconvenient ideas — “were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.

Whatever you think of Jonah Lehrer’s apology, this is a wonderful little tidbit. I wonder, though, if Darwin really did this“without fail”?